About

Welcome to my web site. I am a social anthropologist and scholar of religion at Uppsala University in Sweden. Previously I held the Torgny Segerstedt Guest Professorship at the University of Gothenburg. For several years I taught at Harvard University, where I was privileged to have as many as 600 students per term in my courses on civic courage and engagement. I regularly give lectures outside the university in both Swedish and English.

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Ola Larsmo and I wrote a book of 101 portraits of heroic individuals — 101 historiska hjältar. Details here; the book is available from Bokus and other sellers.It was published in late 2013 by Historiska media (Lund), with English and Korean editions being planned.

I served as the research director of the Raoul Wallenberg Calendar, a collection of 365 accounts of individuals who took great risks for human rights, peace and democracy. The work was published internationally in three languages and was serialized on Radio Sweden on each day of 2013.

Göteborgs-Posten published my book review of Susanne Dodillet’s dissertation, Är sex arbete?, for which I served as examiner. In my own dissertation nine years ago, I celebrated Sweden’s policy on prostitution (criminalizing the buyer but not the seller) as contributing to the “ethos of a sheltering society.” I still think so. What Dodillet achieves is the anthropological endeavor of exoticizing the familiar and familiarizing the exotic, as she shows that the differing Swedish and German policies each make moral sense within particular cultural logics and as products of particular histories. (An interesting comparison can be made with Faye Ginsburg’s book, Contested Lives, which explores the symbolic worlds of activists on both sides of the abortion debate in the USA.) The review is here.